The present invention generally relates to searching techniques and more specifically to techniques for using static and temporal components to search models of objects including temporal information.
As we advance in the information age, the information collected and searched, such as photos, music, movies and home videos, has become increasingly multimedia. The current search techniques for these media are still predominantly text-based, relying on manually or automatically associating keywords with objects for indexing. However, these techniques do not address an important usage where one wishes to look for media objects similar to a given one. This type of “query-by-example” requires a mechanism for comparing two media objects. In the text domain, examples for comparing the similarity of two documents are based on word usage. For images, visual similarities are determined based on color, texture and shape features. For media objects that contain a temporal component, such as video, the same technique developed for images is often used. For instance, two videos are compared frame by frame and the total difference determines their similarity. The technique is improved by some alignment procedure or searching for best-matching frames. However, these methods are still inherently based on static information.
Accordingly, improved techniques for searching an object including temporal information are desired.